Tourism is working for Mexico in more ways than you'd think

It helps the whole economy, not just the places where cruise ships dock.

Cozumel Island near Cancun in the state of Quintana Roo, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.

Cozumel Island near Cancun in the state of Quintana Roo, Yucatan...

You might be planning a cruise to Mexico this summer -- Cancun, perhaps, or Tulum. You have a vague guilt complex about the fact that your income is probably quite a bit higher than the average Mexican's. And maybe you wonder: Am I actually doing this country any good?

That's been a complicated question over the years. Tourism has been criticized for exploiting developing countries, with most of the profits accruing to multinational corporations rather than local businesses. It's also sometimes seen as a sideshow to powerhouse industries like manufacturing and finance.

But it appears that tourism has actually been an unalloyed boon for our southern neighbor, with far-reaching impacts that benefit both the local economies that play host to visitors as well as the economy overall.

That's the conclusion of a rigorous new study from two researchers at the University of California Berkeley, Ben Faber and Cecile Gaubert. They looked at the holistic impact of tourist destinations along the Mexican coastline, and found that both international and domestic tourism has added 4.4 percent to the average Mexican household's real income.

The news is even better for the immediate areas where tourists play. In those cities, an extra 10 percent in tourism spending leads to a 2.8 percent boost in employment. And that's not just from people working in hotels and restaurants. It also comes from a "spillover effect" onto local manufacturing, which ramps up to produce goods that the tourism industry consumes, and is strengthened by the service industries like banking and consulting that gravitate to tourist activity.

On the national level, the manufacturing part of that impact doesn't amount to much, since much of the local factory activity stimulated by tourism is offset by reductions elsewhere. But the overall influx of tourist dollars remains to circulate through the Mexican economy.

Perhaps for that reason, Mexico has come to increasingly rely on tourism, which supplied 14.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2014, according to the World Tourism and Trade Council. And tourism exports have grown by an average of 11 percent per year over the past few decades in developing countries, far outpacing agriculture and often surpassing manufacturing itself.

But maybe you're going to Belize or Vietnam instead of Mexico. Would the impact there be similar to what Faber and Gaubert found? "The cautious answer has to be that no one really knows," Faber says. "Having said that, the mechanisms that we find to be at play are economic forces that should operate in any market environment."